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Examining the impacts of firearm purchaser licensing laws on firearm deaths among youth aged 15 to 24, by age group–USA, 1990-2019

Background

Youth aged 15–24 experience high rates of firearm homicide and suicide, yet there is limited research on the impact of promising preventative policies, such as firearm purchaser licensing (FPL) laws, among this age group. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effect of adopting or repealing an FPL law on homicide and suicide among those aged 15–24, by age subgroup (ie, 15–17, 18–20, 21–24).

Methods

Mortality data from 1990 to 2019 were obtained from the National Center for Health Statistics. We used augmented synthetic controls to estimate the effect of FPL law adoption in Connecticut and Maryland and repeal in Missouri and Michigan on youth homicide and suicide rates. Analyses were stratified by age subgroup and firearm involvement.

Results

FPL adoption was associated with decreases in firearm homicide and suicide among those aged 15–24 overall and among most age subgroups in Connecticut. FPL repeal was consistently associated with increases in firearm suicide among each age subgroup, with less consistent results for firearm homicide.

Discussion and conclusions

FPL law changes had meaningful impacts on firearm homicide and suicide among youth aged 15–24, with consistent protective effects observed following adoption in Connecticut and consistent harmful effects following repeal in Missouri. Mixed results in Maryland and Michigan highlight the importance of policy features and sociopolitical context in shaping the effectiveness of these laws. These findings reinforce the effectiveness of FPL laws as a strategy to reduce firearm-related mortality among youth.

Firearm businesses as partners in suicide prevention: a cross-sectional study of the Gun Shop Project in Colorado, USA

Background

The Gun Shop Project aims to reduce firearm suicide and is widely implemented in the USA, yet little is known about the core firearm business practices and behaviours that might contribute to preventing firearm suicide.

Methods

Owners or managers of all firearm businesses identified as participants in Colorado’s Gun Shop Project were invited to respond to a questionnaire. Data collection occurred from March to May 2021. Analyses included unweighted descriptive statistics with CIs and Pearson 2 tests for categorical associations.

Results

54 firearm businesses participated (response rate: 28%). Under half reported practices that are Gun Shop Project core aspects (range: 14%–45%). 22% of businesses frequently engaged customers on the importance of safe firearm storage in suicide prevention while 26% had denied a firearm sale and 14% had assisted with temporary secure storage in the past year with customers perceived to be in suicidal crisis. However, high proportions reported willingness to engage in these behaviours if a customer was in crisis: 74% were willing to refuse a sale of a firearm or ammunition, 70% were willing to discuss temporary secure storage options and 70% were willing to direct customers to mental health services.

Conclusions

This study suggests that efforts to continue educating and involving firearm businesses may have an impact on the adoption of organisational suicide prevention practices and behaviours. Ongoing efforts are needed to understand core components of Gun Shop Project to inform standardised recommendations for effective firearm business practices that prevent firearm suicide.

The Last Link: from Gun Acquisition to Criminal Use

Guns that are used in crime and recovered by the police typically have changed hands often since first retail sale and are quite old. While there is an extensive literature on “time to crime” for guns, defined as the elapsed time from first retail sale to known use in a crime, there is little information available on the duration of the “last link”—the elapsed time from the transaction that actually provided the offender with the gun in question. In this article, we use data from the new Chicago Inmate Survey (CIS) to estimate the duration of the last link. The median is just 2 months. Many of the gun-involved respondents to the CIS (42%) did not have any gun 6 months prior to their arrest for the current crime. The CIS respondents were almost all barred from purchasing a gun from a gun store because of their prior criminal record—as a result, their guns were obtained by illegal transactions with friends, relatives, and the underground market. We conclude that more effective enforcement of the laws governing gun transactions may have a quick and pervasive effect on gun use in crime.

Underground Gun Markets

This article provides an economic analysis of underground gun markets, drawing on interviews with gang members, gun dealers, professional thieves, prostitutes, police, public school security guards and teenagers in the city of Chicago, complemented by results from government surveys of recent arrestees in 22 cities, plus administrative data for suicides, homicides, robberies, arrests and confiscated crime guns. We find evidence that transactions costs are considerable in the underground gun market in Chicago, and to some extent in other cities as well. The most likely explanation is that the underground gun market is both illegal and ‘thin’– relevant information about trading opportunities is scarce due to illegality, which makes search costly for market participants and leads to a market thickness effect on transaction costs.

Ghost Guns: A Haunting New Reality

On April 7, 2021, President Biden announced multiple executive actions on gun violence with several specifically targeted at addressing the nation’s ghost gun problem. But what exactly are ghost guns, what challenges do they pose, and how would these actions help find a solution?

Ghost guns are homemade firearms that cannot be traced by law enforcement. They are an emerging problem across the United States, being used in crimes and recovered by law enforcement at a rate that continues to climb with each passing year. In 2020, law enforcement in New York State recovered 220 ghost guns compared to 72 in 2019 and only 38 in 2018, a 479 percent increase statewide over the three-year period, according to data from the New York State Intelligence Center. Similarly, the Baltimore Police Department reported a 400 percent increase in ghost gun recoveries from 2019 to 2020. In Washington, DC, the number of ghost gun recoveries jumped from just three in 2017 to 282 in 2020.

While these numbers may represent a relatively low percentage of total gun recoveries, ghost guns pose a unique and rapidly growing challenge. Law enforcement agencies are unable to trace and therefore prohibit the flow of ghost guns. While the federal government considers regulations, state and local lawmakers are exploring and enacting laws and policies designed to monitor and prevent ghost guns from falling into the hands of people who are prohibited from purchasing or possessing firearms.

Curbing the Illicit Market: Enhancing Firearm Regulations to Reduce Gun Violence

America is entrenched in an ongoing epidemic of gun violence. During the COVID-19 pandemic, homicides and nonfatal shootings spiked, reaching unprecedented levels in many US cities. Gun violence remains exceptionally high around the country, although there is evidence that homicides are beginning to decrease in cities like Atlanta, Los Angeles, and Minneapolis. Generally, the US has a homicide rate roughly 25 times higher than most peer industrialized countries and contains about 40 percent of the global stock of civilian firearms. Almost all of the firearms that end up on the streets are first sold through legally appointed federally licensed firearm dealers (FFLs) following manufacture or import. Given the unique ease of access to firearms in the US, there is a growing sense of urgency to better understand how crime guns are acquired and from where they originate to support much stronger supply-side efforts to address gun violence.

Prior research has focused extensively on the large “secondary market” for firearms, where guns are transferred between unlicensed persons or to those legally prohibited from buying a firearm. Most guns used in a crime are illegally acquired through secondary market channels via small-scale purchases, middlemen, and “fences” that supply weapons to local illicit markets. In contrast, the focus of our recent work has been on the “primary market,” which includes the legal retail sale of firearms from federally licensed firearm dealers (FFLs) to private consumers. The primary market directly feeds the illicit secondary market for firearms.

Campaign of fear and consumption: problematizing gender-based marketing of weapons

This paper problematizes the fear-based marketing of guns and tasers to both men and women as a function of neoliberalism’s emphasis on consumption as the solution to social problems. Men are marketed dangerous weapons as a way to display their masculinity, while women are told that purchasing guns or tasers is one of the best ways to protect themselves from domestic violence and sexual assault. As the paper shows, that claim is in stark contrast to data about these phenomena, and yet such marketing is often taken as a common sense solution. In addition to detailing why such marketing of weapons is problematic, we offer several recommendations.

Measuring the Market for Legal Firearms

The Massachusetts Firearms Records Bureau recently published administrative data covering the universe of legal firearm transactions in the state. We use these data to validate state-level background checks as a proxy for firearm transactions and show that historical trends in transactions within Massachusetts align with the rest of the United States. Using auxiliary data from a national survey, we show that the Massachusetts dataset can detect patterns in the demographics of both gun ownership and type of firearm purchased. Our analysis suggests that this dataset is a promising source of information for studying interactions in the market for legal firearms.

In Search of Common Ground: Expert Judgments on Gun Policy Effects

As our review of the existing literature demonstrated, there is very little scientific evidence available to support the decisions that policymakers and the public must make about whether to implement or change various gun policies. Without strong scientific evidence, policymakers and the public rely heavily on what advocates or social scientists believe the effects of policies are most likely to be. The opinions of these gun policy experts are an important influence on gun policy debates and decisions because people believe that the experts have an especially well-informed understanding of the gun polices under consideration, how similar laws have performed historically, and how specific policies would affect particular stakeholder groups.

Different communities of gun policy experts have sharply divided views on many gun policies, as often becomes clear in the debates that occur when states and the federal government consider new gun legislation. Less clear is whether there are laws or policies for which such differences are less stark, or whether there may be a combination of policies that experts of every stripe could regard as an improvement over existing policies. Finally, it has not been clear whether experts disagree about which objectives gun policies should be trying to achieve or whether experts agree on the objectives but disagree on which policies are most likely to achieve those objectives. If the experts chiefly disagree on the latter, this suggests a role for new and better scientific study of the true effects of gun policies.

To begin to answer these questions, RAND researchers surveyed 173 gun policy experts (across two fieldings in 2016 and 2020) on what they believed the effects of the following 19 gun policies would be on ten different outcomes.